“That long?” he said in a whittled tone of loss, his voice trailing off.

“And in that time nothing good has happened. You’ve gotten repetitive. Incoherent sometimes. I lost the baby—your baby. You almost drowned.”

He was slumped, holding his hands to his eyes. She wanted to say more but was overcome by pity, the big tattooed man with muscular shoulders sitting hunched over in silence, his posture that of a child sorrowing for a wrong he’d done.

He was fragile, he was broken, she had to be careful, and she drove as steadily as she could, so as not to jar him with sudden acceleration or braking. She lulled him with the monotony of the straight road and, on the outskirts of Wahiawa, just before the bridge at Lake Wilson, she slowed the car.

Sharkey still slumped, Olive looked over and saw scattered rags at the base of the embankment, a tipped-over supermarket shopping cart, a baby carriage, and she knew that this was not junk or discarded but the elements of primitive domesticity, the camp at the top of a steep path where, beneath the eucalyptus trees and the Norfolk pines, there were people in dirty tents or under tarps, a cluster of homeless people, cooking over wood fires, muttering in the dampness, and children too, living like jungle folk, hidden by bushes—the Hawaii she hadn’t expected, of bad days. The woodsmoke and tang of burned meat from those huddled poor gave off the misleading odor of a picnic.

After the bridge, another light and the low town, she turned left and at the top of the hill another left, Sharkey groaning with each turn.

“Oh God.”

“We have to do this.”

The police station was a one-story, flat-topped building at the street’s dead end, behind a well-lighted parking lot.

“I don’t want to go in.”

“Just try to remember what happened, and we might not have to.”

She parked the car and led Sharkey to the open terrace where, on the night of the accident, she’d approached him, the rain falling hard, and he’d said, “I ran into a drunk homeless guy.”

That is wrong, she’d thought, but she hadn’t acted, hadn’t corrected him. And afterward his life stalled, went sideways, seemed to drag to a halt, and he’d become hopeless.

I have to revisit that scene, she’d thought, his dishonest statement.

They climbed the stairs to the terrace where the police station sat like a fortified building atop a swale of sloping grass, a lava-rock wall at its perimeter. Seeing her pass him on the stairs, Sharkey paused, but she gestured for him to follow, insisting with her beckoning hand.

Sharkey obeyed, digging his toes ahead of him—the reluctant child again—and when he drew near her he whispered, “I’m not going in there. You can’t make me.”